What You Need To Know

In the world of the globally distributed and mobile workforce, the needs of
backing up enterprise data are constantly evolving and becoming more
complex. Organizations must ensure that corporate information is not only
recoverable in the event of system failure, but they must do so across a
variety of endpoints such as laptops, tablets, or mobile handsets at any
location around the globe.

As they work to ensure these capabilities, business decision makers must
balance concerns around encryption, varying data privacy regulations in
certain geographic regions, and delivering the service in a way that is
minimally disruptive to end users. Further, IT must consider how to
provide these services without overtaxing the limited administrative
bandwidth at their disposal.

Existing legacy solutions such as HP Connected or Microsoft Data
Protection Manager were not originally designed to deliver on the business
needs of today’s mobile-first and cloud-centric workforce. To this end, Blue
Hill conducted deep qualitative interviews with four organizations that felt
these pain points and navigated the solution selection process to invest in
their enterprise endpoint backup capabilities.

Ultimately, each participant selected inSync from Druva, a California-based
endpoint data protection and governance provider, to address their needs. By
distilling common challenges, investment drivers, and resulting business
impacts, Blue Hill expects that the experience of these four organizations will
provide guidance to business decision makers in similar situations.

About the Subjects

Subjects in this initiative represent mid- to large-sized firms
across a variety of industry verticals. This includes a Canadian
food-services provider with over 900 restaurants and $1 billion
in annual revenue, one of the United States’ largest medical
equipment providers, a global electronics manufacturer, and a
prominent global consultancy with over 6,500 employees.

Drivers for Investment

Prior to selecting Druva, each of the subjects had in place an
existing endpoint backup solution that included HP Connected,
Microsoft Data Protection Manager, and Dell’s endpoint backup
suite. Blue Hill also observed Accellion, a managed file transfer
vendor rather than a designed endpoint backup provider, which
supported backups as well.

A number of factors precipitated the research participants’
decision to seek an alternative solution provider. In the case of both the global electronics manufacturer
and healthcare equipment provider, their existing solutions were unable to function properly at an
enterprise scale. For the electronics manufacturer, an acquisition dictated their prior solution. In each
instance, their attempts at backing up endpoints consistently failed, and required oversight that was far
in excess of what was deemed reasonable.

More specifically, participants reported that their legacy solutions required a level of maintenance and
oversight that was too taxing on their time and resources. Participants cited that it was not uncommon
to spend multiple hours each week managing their endpoint backups. Additionally, the solutions were
slow at accomplishing backups, which impeded employee device usage, or discouraged end users from
running backups at all.

“We pay less than $150 a year per-user
and we charge our consultants out at
at least $150 an hour. Anything
beyond saving them one hour is a
bonus. It’s easy to justify the cost,
especially when employees are in a
revenue-generating role. Keeping our
employees able to bill is paramount.
Restoring lost laptops and removing
the need to reboot or reconstruct files
is critical. The time we save is time
we can bill.”

Director of IT
Global Consultancy

Another common investment driver was the need for global expansion. Several companies that Blue Hill
analyzed, including the global consultancy and the electronics manufacturer, have a globally distributed
workforce that is highly mobile. These companies needed a way to maintain endpoint backups
regardless of where their employees were. Having an end user back up their device to a data center
halfway across the globe can present a number of issues with performance and logistics, especially if an
end user needs to log into a VPN connection just to perform a backup. Further, there are significant and
growing challenges with varying data privacy laws, especially in countries in the EU. For organizations
looking to back up data for their European-based employees, they often must use data centers based in
specific countries and comply with a more nuanced set of regulations.

Ultimately, these challenges drove the studied organizations to evaluate new solutions that could meet
their requirements associated with performance, ease of management, and global workforce needs.

Choosing Druva

As the participants moved through their solution evaluation process,
they weighted the comparative merits of a number of solutions
alongside Druva, including HP Connected, Microsoft Data Protection
Manager, Box, Mozy Pro, and Code 42. Ultimately, the participants
selected Druva inSync. Blue Hill observed common differentiators that
gave Druva the competitive edge over the other solutions considered.
Most frequently, the factors that lead to Druva’s selection were:

Global Presence: Druva’s cloud includes data centers located in North
America, Europe, and Asia, backed by Amazon Web Services. This was
one of the strongest differentiators for Druva, as the other considered
solutions, including HP Connected and Code 42, did not have such an
option at the time of the organizations’ decisions. This was important to the IT decision makers for two
reasons. First, it presented a significant logistical advantage. Subjects with a global footprint were
concerned with the inefficiencies of users backing up their end points to North America-based data
centers, the burden that this would place on their network, and the time it would take to complete
backups. Druva’s cloud being in closer proximity to their workforce mitigated these concerns. Secondly,
Druva’s data centers in Europe allow organizations to be compliant with the more stringent data
privacy laws of countries in the European Union such as Germany and Ireland. When faced with this
decision, the unappealing alternative to selecting Druva was for organizations to build their own data
centers in these countries, or find another way to comply with regulations.

“Within 20 minutes of them giving me
credentials I was running backups on
multiple devices… Druva has an
automated provisioning process. For
90% of our user population, no one in IT
even touches it. Automatic provisioning
is an absolute must now.”

Senior Manager of IT Infrastructure
Electronics Manufacturing

Ease of Scalability: Research participants reported that Druva presented the solution that was most
easily scalable throughout their organization. The cloud-based delivery model of Druva meant that
organizations did not have to build new data centers if they wanted to increase the amount of endpoints
they were backing up just because it surpassed their current storage capacity threshold. This benefit
became quite valuable, especially in the case of the global consultancy. The consultancy had recently
acquired a competitor that expanded their headcount by almost 1,500 employees overnight. As these
employees were located around the world, provisioning them with an endpoint backup solution would
have been an arduous task if the firm had stuck with its original on-premises solution. Doing so would
have required building new data centers and expanding headcount to manage the servers
internationally. In addition, participants identified Druva’s ability to automatically provision new users
as a significant productivity improvement. Overall, Druva was identified as the best solution to deal
with growth, as provisioning new employees required no additional infrastructure and little additional
administrative responsibility.

Data Encryption: Druva’s data encryption capabilities, both in transit
and at rest, were also a competitive differentiator for research
participants to ensure that corporate data was being protected when
employees were actually backing up their data, regardless of the path
that the data took to go back into the public, hybrid, or private cloud
backup destination. Druva’s approach both for data encryption and
data security led to perceived differentiation and added value. For
encryption, Druva encrypts the data both in transit using 256-bit TLS
(Secure Sockets Layer) and at rest through AES (Advanced Encryption
Standard). Additionally, Druva uses both two-factor encryption key
management and two-factor authentication to ensure no party has
access to unencrypted data. When making a holistic assessment of
overall security, an important point of differentiation arises in Druva’s
purposeful approach to preclude Druva employees from having any
access to customer data stored in the cloud. Druva’s access is limited only to administrative tasks of
patching and upgrades, which minimizes customer’s data risk profiles even to potential vendor
influence.

“Their support is the best I’ve seen
and I’ve worked with a lot of
different support teams. They are
very responsive. The phone barely
rings and they pick up.”

Network Systems Manager
Medical Equipment Provider

Licensing and Multi Device Support: Druva licenses on a per-user basis rather than on a per-device
basis. In contrast, Blue Hill found that HP Connected charges additional fees for each device that an
employee uses. Research participants noted that this was an important factor in choosing Druva over
the competition, as employees either have or are planning to have multiple endpoints that need to be
backed up, including tablets, phones, and/or laptops. Participants perceived this as an indicator of a
lower total cost of ownership.

In a similar vein, some of the evaluated solutions (such as Microsoft Data Protection Manager) were not
optimized for other operating systems and devices. Research participants, even those that were
traditionally a Microsoft shop, wanted a solution that could support whatever hardware and software
decisions they needed to make in the future.

Customer Support: Customer support was consistently mentioned by each of the four participants as
meaningful in their choice of Druva. Overall, during the evaluation process, Druva’s response times to
inquiries and willingness to work with the participants was notably superior to that of the competition,
and factored into the final decision. It is worth noting that ongoing support after implementing Druva
was rated exceptionally well by the research participants.

While research participants initially selected Druva inSync with a
focus on cloud backup, the available data governance and e-discovery
capabilities interested several of the companies. Druva provides an
opportunity for organizations to audit their file archives, monitor
activity, and manage data governance policies from a central platform.
This represented a significant advantage over incumbent processes
for accomplishing these goals, and Blue Hill found that existing
Druva customers appreciated this value proposition to a greater
extent after they purchased the inSync solution. After growing
comfortable with Druva’s endpoint backup capabilities, the
organizations that Blue Hill studied took the next step of exploring
additional compliance and governance value that these additional
features provided.

“Backups used to be our worst
nightmare. They failed all of the time.
Now, I have only seen one failed
backup in 2 years and it was our
fault. If DLP [Data Loss Protection] is
important to you, then Druva’s is
really good.”

Desktop IT Lead
Food Services

Selection Spotlight: Choosing Druva inSync over HP Connected

The global electronics manufacturer presented a particularly compelling case as they navigated their
choices for an endpoint backup solution. After experiencing a number of challenges with their existing
environment, they launched a thorough evaluation process of viable alternatives. In the process of
doing so, the IT and business decision makers made direct head-to-head comparisons between Druva
inSync and HP Connected.

In preparing for this analysis, the IT infrastructure manager and his team compiled a list of features that
they considered necessary to a successful implementation. The team identified that their new endpoint
backup solution must: present a low total cost of ownership, work seamlessly with employees that
experience infrequent connectivity, have sufficient security and encryption capabilities, and support
users in European locations.

As the firm went through their evaluation process, it became clear to them Druva presented the only
viable option for their particular business needs. In the direct comparison with HP Connected, the
global electronics manufacturer highlighted several instances where Druva differentiated itself as the
superior solution from a technical capabilities standpoint.

The three most prominent differentiating factors were:

Superior deduplication capabilities

Better network utilization

More robust encryption and security

The IT infrastructure manager identified Druva as having far more advanced deduplication capabilities
than HP Connected. Druva has the ability to deduplicate information on a more granular level than just
the device level, meaning that Druva does not backup redundant information from multiple devices
across the entire enterprise. For example, if the same file existed on 500 devices, HP Connected would
back up this file 500 times whereas Druva would only back up this file once. The impact of this
capability is that Druva is able to drastically enhance the efficiency of backups. In contrast, HP
Connected was found to unnecessarily backup large quantities of redundant data. The team identified
Druva’s advantages in deduplication as leading to smaller, faster, and overall better backups than what
HP Connected could provide.

In conjunction with more efficient backups, Druva not only placed less strain on bandwidth limitations,
but also more intelligently balanced network utilization rates than HP Connected. This further provides
an opportunity to reduce demands on IT infrastructure and allows for faster backups while minimizing
potential bottlenecks and other instances that would require manual oversight.

In the evaluation, the electronics manufacturer also noted that Druva’s ability to encrypt data at rest and
in transit was an important differentiator. The IT infrastructure team evaluated Druva’s overall security
as superior to what HP Connected could provide. This had a two-fold impact on compliance needs and
peace of mind.

It should be noted that the electronics manufacturer also placed great importance on the presence of
European data centers and the advantageous licensing model that Druva provided. Consistent with the
broader themes discussed in the prior section, Druva’s advantages in these areas were material in the
decision making process. This served to further solidify their position when holistically evaluating the
value offering of Druva in comparison to HP Connected.

Resulting Business Impact

Since choosing and implementing Druva, the studied organizations reported a number of impacts on
their business of tangible magnitude. The benefits realized could primarily be attributed to IT efficiency
gains and their resulting financial implications.

IT Efficiency: The efficiency savings that participants experienced after deploying Druva were both
significant and measurable. This study demonstrates that Druva provided a reduction in administrative
resources required to run successful endpoint backups. The global electronics manufacturer went from
requiring nearly full-time attention of a dedicated employee to almost no administrative oversight. To
this end, the global consultancy also experienced measured efficiency gains. Prior to Druva, they hosted
the information on their own internal servers. Upkeep of the end-point backup process traditionally
required 2-3 hours a week, but as their infrastructure aged, this time requirement ballooned to 2-3 hours
each day. With Druva, the participant reported that their administrative oversight was almost
non-existent. Similarly, the medical equipment provider reported that they were able to take an almost
completely hands off approach to endpoint backup administration after deploying Druva.

In addition to reduced administrative time, participants reported that
Druva made performing the backups themselves considerably more
efficient. In the case of the Canadian food services company, their
backups took sometimes in excess of a week to complete. Since Druva,
this was reduced to approximately 2 hours a week. A crucial aspect
driving these efficiency gains is Druva’s ability to automatically
provision new users, since this allows IT teams to broaden the scope of
their end point backups without incurring additional time
commitments.

Participants in IT organizations also noted another benefit in peace of
mind. While this may not be an explicit efficiency gain, its impact on
IT’s relationship to the endpoint backup process was meaningful. Prior to Druva, participants were
constantly monitoring their backup process as it frequently broke, worked incorrectly, or otherwise
required maintenance. Participants reported that Druva eliminated these concerns by effectively
running in the background without the need for monitoring.

“For Druva we spend zero time.
There is no administration.
When we hire someone it is all
automated. We update the
directory and it automatically
provisions the accounts on
Druva and emails the user.
Sometimes we get a request, but
it is negligible.”

Director of IT
Global Consultancy

Financial Impact: From a financial perspective, Druva was found to have both an implicit and explicit
impact. Explicitly, Druva was generally found to reduce the total cost of ownership of endpoint backup.
This stemmed largely from Druva’s licensing model, cloud delivery model, and increased personnel
efficiency. Participants found that licensing on a per-user basis (as Druva allows) rather than on a
per-device basis proved advantageous to the participants. Additionally, Druva allows for organizations
to reassign licenses from employees that leave the company rather than requiring the organization to
purchase a new license. Further, the cloud delivery model allows organizations to disassociate
themselves from the cost of maintaining and building physical infrastructure. As previously discussed,
the reduction in backup and monitoring personnel costs also allowed companies to reallocated
employees to higher-value tasks.

An interesting counterpoint from a financial perspective is that maintaining physical infrastructure can
potentially have a cost advantage from an accounting and reporting view. Data centers can be
depreciated as an asset, which has certain advantages over recurring expenses spent on recurring
monthly cloud expenses. However, in practice, participants found that the overall gains in efficiency
from Druva, costs of licensing, and the upfront and ongoing costs of building and maintaining
infrastructure were enough to overcome this argument. As one example, the Canadian-based food
services company analyzed by Blue Hill reported that switching to Druva resulted in a roughly
two-thirds cost savings over their prior solution.

Implicitly, Druva made a financial impact through the efficiencies and time savings it enabled. Because
Druva reduced administrative oversight, IT team members shifted from a reactive role to a proactive
role and no longer had to worry about putting out recurring fires.

Another indirect financial impact comes into play when considering Druva’s effect on line-of-business
productivity. Backups can affect employee productivity in a number of ways. Business users know that
backups that slow down or crash their devices have a net negative effect by adding downtime
throughout the working day. More importantly, if a device is lost or stolen, the ease of restoring
relevant information to the employee’s device can have an impact on their productivity as well. In short,
the faster the employee is able to get the information they need to begin working again, the sooner they
can start being productive again. Especially in organizations that charge out their employees via billable
hours, every hour of uptime that a superior backup solution provides can be directly traced to
additional revenue. In the case of the global consultancy where employees typically bill clients
hundreds of dollars an hour, even the first hour of additional uptime more than covers the licensing
costs.

Conclusions and Key Takeaways

Blue Hill offers the experiences of these four research participants so that business and IT decisions
makers can identify pain points and business opportunities relevant to their own organization. Legacy
endpoint backup solutions that were not created to reflect the reality of a changing mobility landscape
and distributed workforce can provide real challenges in enterprise scalability and IT efficiency. It is
clear from the experience of the studied organizations that Druva presented an opportunity to not only
provide the technical requirements necessary for modern endpoint backups, but also the opportunity to
reduce oversight, infrastructure, data footprint, and headaches traditionally associated with the process.

IT staff should audit the amount of time they are currently spending on managing and provisioning
their endpoint backup processes each week. In considering the cost of investment in Druva or
competing endpoint backup solutions, potential buyers should also consider the implicit financial
benefits of reallocated time to more value-added activities. In the case of line-of-business productivity,
there may be an opportunity to draw a direct line between reduced downtime and firm revenue. IT
decision makers able to quantify the hourly cost associated with line-of-business employees will be able
to create a compelling argument when presenting the business case for their investment. By considering
the holistic financial and technical experiences of these four studied organizations, Blue Hill expects that
organizations investigating enterprise-wide endpoint backup solutions will be better prepared to make
a decision that aligns both with the new needs of mobile and cloud-based IT, and to increase IT
efficiencies to encourage greater technical innovation and improved technical support.

About the Author – James Haight, Analyst

James Haight is a research analyst at Blue Hill Research
focusing on analytics and emerging enterprise technologies.
His primary research includes exploring the business case
development and solution assessment for data warehousing,
data integration, advanced analytics and business
intelligence applications. He also hosts Blue Hill’s Emerging
Tech Roundup Podcast, which features interviews with
industry leaders and CEOs on the forefront of a variety of
emerging technologies. Prior to Blue Hill Research, James
worked in Radford Consulting’s Executive and Board of
Director Compensation practice, specializing in the high
tech and life sciences industries. Currently he serves on
the strategic advisory board of the Bentley Microfinance
Group, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to
community development through funding and consulting
entrepreneurs in the Greater Boston area.

About the Author – Hyoun Park, Chief Research Officer

Hyoun Park is the Chief Research Officer of Blue Hill
Research where he oversees day-to-day research
operations, delivery and methodology focused on vendor
and technology selection. In addition, Park covers
analytics and enterprise mobility technologies as a noted
advisor, social influencer, and practitioner. Park has been
named as a top 10 Big Data, analytics, and mobility
influencer including quotes in USA Today, the Los Angeles
Times, and a wide variety of industry media sources. Over
the past 20 years, Park has been on the cutting edge of web,
social, cloud, and mobile technologies in both startup and
enterprise roles. Park holds a Masters of Business
Administration from Boston University and graduated with
a Bachelor of Arts in Women’s and Gender Studies from
Amherst College.

About Blue Hill Research

Blue Hill Research is the only industry analyst firm with a success-based methodology. Based on the Path to Success, Blue Hill
Research provides unique and differentiated guidance to translate corporate technology investments into success for the three key
stakeholders: the technologist, the financial buyer, and the line of business executive.

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About Druva

Druva is the leader in cloud data protection and information management, leveraging the public cloud to offer a single pane of glass to protect, preserve and discover information – dramatically increasing the availability and visibility of business critical information, while reducing the risk, cost and complexity of managing and protecting it.